


The Great Affair

by skidmo



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-20
Updated: 2013-04-20
Packaged: 2017-12-08 23:30:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/767351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skidmo/pseuds/skidmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve gets a glimpse of Orpheus' world. The great American road trip, Greek style.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great Affair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [misslucyjane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslucyjane/gifts).



> Birthday gift fic for misslucyjane, based on an RP relationship in Milliways Bar.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.  
― Robert Louis Stevenson

 

 

Most evenings, they camped somewhere away from the highway or whatever back road they’d been making their way down. Steve built a fire and they shared a simple dinner, and then Orpheus pulled out his guitar, resting back against a log or a stone or one of their packs and played, and Steve settled close to him with his sketchpad across his lap, pencil in hand.

Sometimes he sketched their surroundings, sun setting over deserts or plains or mountains or lakes, but mostly he sketched Orpheus, the furrow of his brow as he teased out a melody, the play of firelight and shadow across his face, his steadily thickening beard.

There was still too much melancholy in the music for Steve’s liking, but it did seem to be getting better. He wondered for a while if this were really true or if he was simply hearing what he wanted to hear, but then he started flipping through his sketches and he noticed the change there as well. There was a little less furrowing, a little more peace, and Steve realized that Orpheus’ music affected his drawing. Art calling to art. And if his sketches were a little darker than they once had been, Orpheus’ music was a little lighter, and that seemed like a fair trade to him.

***

He hadn’t been quite ready for the animals.

It was one thing to watch Orpheus charm a pillow into plumping itself or hum the rain away from them as they rode. It was quite another to be sitting under a tree and watch as Orpheus sang a quiet, simple melody to a sparrow as it hopped its way closer, settling happily on Orpheus’ knee, or to stare in amazement as squirrel after squirrel brought them nuts until they had a small pile all because Orpheus had strummed out a nut-sharing song.

The best, though, was when they stopped at the National Butterfly Center, and Steve stood, astonished, arms out, as Orpheus hummed an almost inaudible tune until Steve’s arms and shoulders and chest and hair were covered in butterflies, all calmly twitching their wings, as content as Steve was to sit and listen to Orpheus’ song.

(Best of all was the way Orpheus laughed, his face open and happy, sending the butterflies scurrying off again, filling their absence with his presence, arms curling around Steve’s waist as he leaned in for a kiss Steve was only too happy to supply.)

***

The thing he hadn’t expected, the thing that made his chest tighten in a way that he was unsure if it was happy or sad, the thing that made him hope and despair in equal measure, was the children.

He had thought Orpheus would be awkward around children, not wanting them himself. He’d thought Orpheus would avoid them or brush them aside or tense up around them. It wasn’t the sort of thing that came up often, of course. They were mostly on their own, or if they were around children, it was only incidental. School groups at museums or zoos or parks.

They did, on occasion, get people asking for autographs or pictures. Not just from Orpheus, which Steve had been expecting, but also from Steve, who was often asked if he was “ _that_ Steve” and what he thought of his song.

(“I guess I am,” he’d say, smiling sheepishly. “And I think it’s really something.”)

All of that he’d been expecting. He hadn’t been expecting the day they’d hiked to a little picnic spot by a lake and a small girl had come over to Orpheus with a daisy in her hand. Nor had he been expecting Orpheus to smile and lean forward and duck his head so she could weave it into his hair. And he certainly hadn’t expected Orpheus to press a kiss to her forehead and whisper something in Ancient Greek before sending her off.

When he noticed Steve staring, Orpheus just smiled and shook his head and said, “The children of Apollo find their way all over the world.”

“And then they find you,” Steve said, and Orpheus nodded and smiled again, closing his eyes as he leaned back, turning his face up to the sun.

***

In Chicago there was a Greek family who inexplicably invite them for dinner and then to stay the night. After breakfast, Steve found Orpheus in the back yard with the little boy, not older than five or six, both of them sitting cross-legged on the grass, guitars in laps, as Orpheus modeled a simple, four-note tune, and the boy echoed it, concentration wrinkling his forehead. Orpheus laughed when the boy got it right, and then he looked up at Steve and smiled, and something in Steve’s chest tightened and then loosened, and he smiled back, though he couldn’t say precisely why.

***

At a fruit stand at the side of the highway, Steve looked through crates of berries, turning to ask Orpheus if he preferred raspberries or blackberries, but Orpheus was nowhere to be seen. He wandered a bit further, toward the back of the stand. There was music in the air, several voices singing, and Steve followed its trail to a dusty lot behind the stand where Orpheus was spinning circles with a tiny girl who clung tightly to his hands, a ring of children around them singing a simple rhyme in Spanish while their abuelita watched from her chair, nodding along with the tune. (They were invited for dinner there too. And to stay the night. And for one of the girls’ quinceañeras the next night.)

***

Steve wanted to ask about it, ask about children and Orpheus and why he didn’t want them in his life when he was so good with them, when they made him smile like they did, but he couldn’t find the words or the time, and they just kept heading west, miles falling under the tires and days passing in a long, pleasant blur of diners and campsites and cheap motels and the occasional autograph or invitation or blessing, and eventually they were at the ocean again, in Oregon, rather than California. Orpheus had insisted and said they could head down the coast later, but the ocean felt like the ending of this trip. Especially when Orpheus guided him up a gravel road, into the lush forest, to a house built into a tree. There was a trail that led down to a small dock from there, a sailboat tethered in the water.

“Is this your home?” Steve asked, finding it odd to think of Orpheus out here so far away from people, in this wide, spacious home rather than his cramped, Parisian flat, mere blocks from Notre Dame.

And then Orpheus turned to him with a smile and said, “I think it might be now.”

It wasn’t an answer, and it wasn’t an ending, but it was enough for now, and everything else would come from that.


End file.
